We spent a day driving southwards from Waimate, heading for the city of Dunedin or around abouts where we were planning to stay for a few days.
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We stopped off on the way to have a look at the Moeraki boulders. I’ve seen many photos of these rocks and was surprised that there weren’t more of them – photos can be deceptive! Visiting at low tide is a must or you don’t see much at all. It was low(ish) tide when we were there but that was good luck rather than good planning on our part.
The boulders are pretty cool nonetheless and a close up shows the rock formation
Some are split a bit like an egg that’s hatching
or hatched with the fractured pieces spread around!
This is where they come from, out of the earth and this boulder will eventually separate and join the others on the beach.
We were on our way to catch up over a coffee with Brigid and Warren, who live at a great place called Warrington just south of Dunedin. It’s a fantastic place with a couple of beach options. One a very exposed wild expanse of beach and the other a tidal inlet that is much more sheltered.
We ended up staying the night with them and their two dogs, Louise (a very licky Labradoodle) and Rosie (a very dozy but lovely Newfoundland) and headed into Dunedin the next morning. Brig and Warren had a great recommendation for coffee at a café in Port Chalmers so we made that our first stop. I was on the phone outside so didn’t notice a couple walk in and sit down but when I came back inside off the phone the first person I saw was an old friend of mine, Solis. Solis and I used to ride motorbikes together (along with Nick who will also crop up later on) when we were at university and it was such a shock to see him as I thought he was still in the US. We ended up staying with Solis, his flatmate Tom, Fish the cat and Bryn the dog for two nights. This is Solis and I on Aramoana beach, about 10mins drive down the road from where he lives.
Solis and his flatmate Tom were renting a great house on a hill in Port Chalmers
with a view of the harbour and Otago Peninsula in the distance. It was a pretty quiet sort of place only about 15mins drive out of Dunedin city and there are loads of native birds around the place and very colourful birdsong
It was lovely having animals around and Bryn was young, very enthusiastic and great to cuddle
View Larger Map
We stopped off on the way to have a look at the Moeraki boulders. I’ve seen many photos of these rocks and was surprised that there weren’t more of them – photos can be deceptive! Visiting at low tide is a must or you don’t see much at all. It was low(ish) tide when we were there but that was good luck rather than good planning on our part.
The boulders are pretty cool nonetheless and a close up shows the rock formation
Some are split a bit like an egg that’s hatching
or hatched with the fractured pieces spread around!
This is where they come from, out of the earth and this boulder will eventually separate and join the others on the beach.
We were on our way to catch up over a coffee with Brigid and Warren, who live at a great place called Warrington just south of Dunedin. It’s a fantastic place with a couple of beach options. One a very exposed wild expanse of beach and the other a tidal inlet that is much more sheltered.
We ended up staying the night with them and their two dogs, Louise (a very licky Labradoodle) and Rosie (a very dozy but lovely Newfoundland) and headed into Dunedin the next morning. Brig and Warren had a great recommendation for coffee at a café in Port Chalmers so we made that our first stop. I was on the phone outside so didn’t notice a couple walk in and sit down but when I came back inside off the phone the first person I saw was an old friend of mine, Solis. Solis and I used to ride motorbikes together (along with Nick who will also crop up later on) when we were at university and it was such a shock to see him as I thought he was still in the US. We ended up staying with Solis, his flatmate Tom, Fish the cat and Bryn the dog for two nights. This is Solis and I on Aramoana beach, about 10mins drive down the road from where he lives.
Solis and his flatmate Tom were renting a great house on a hill in Port Chalmers
with a view of the harbour and Otago Peninsula in the distance. It was a pretty quiet sort of place only about 15mins drive out of Dunedin city and there are loads of native birds around the place and very colourful birdsong
It was lovely having animals around and Bryn was young, very enthusiastic and great to cuddle
except when she farted (she knew it too – check out the look on her face!!)
Fish was the most gorgeous cat I’ve come across for a while. She was rather heavy and really thundered down the corridor. She also had the longest white whiskers.
We took the dog to Aramoana beach that was empty apart from a few surfers and she went nuts, hooning up and down on the sand
Then it was home time on her special seat in the front of the van.
We spent more time in Dunedin than we’d intended as we really liked the place. It seemed to have more character than Christchurch, older buildings and generally a nicer feel to it. We visited the art gallery, cathedral and the local brewery (most important!). We also by a weird chance caught up with another friend, Helen, who also lives in Dunedin with her two gorgeous kids, Harris and Meg. Helen was fantastic and had us for dinner both nights we were there so we managed to do a lot of talking and catching up!
We also did a tour of the old Speights Brewery that was surprisingly really good! The brewery uses a gravity brewing process, one of the few left in the world to do so apparently. The marketing always used to make me laugh.
A few years back the company put an old NZ Southern-style pub on a boat and toured the world with it. There was a great photo of this old pub on the back of a boat going under the Tower Bridge in London.
The brewery now only does batch brewing that increases from one to two days a week to three when the Otago University students are back in town and still uses old copper stills that were imported from England
It is also the only brewery in the world to use wooden gyles. These ones are made out of Kauri, a native NZ wood, and hold 25,000 litres of beer (they're set into the ground). Apparently they lost a brew because a visitor looked in (he was invited to) and his sunglasses fell off his head into the brew.
The brewery is built above a natural spring and this water is used to make the beer and is also offered free on tap outside. This chap was filling up loads of water bottles and I had to explain to him why I was taking his photo.
The tour ended with unlimited sampling of the seven different Speights beers and we could have easily been there all afternoon. I got Euan to try the Speights Old Dark ice cream that is just divine and, after a taste, he agreed with me and there wasn’t much left in the tub once we'd finished with it!
This is the railway station that was a nice looking old building both inside and out. The tiles on the floor were tiny Royal Doulton tiles from the UK. The brewery also had Royal Doulton tiles – a bit upmarket for a brewery we thought!
Dunedin has some pretty steep streets
and is home to the steepest street in the world, Baldwin Street with an average gradient of 1m increase in every 3.4 and at its steepest its 1m in every 2.86m.
I’m sure that I’ve ridden up steeper in Surrey Hills in the UK but perhaps they’re roads and not streets… We were freezing in shorts at 7 degrees (summer must come later now in NZ!)…
This camper van ground its way up the street in the wet, tyres skidding but I bet he wasn’t in 1st gear like we were in our ridiculously underpowered car! These rental vans are pretty cool and very eye catching with each individually painted.
The Dunedin Cathedral looked large from the front but was in fact an odd shape (was almost wider than it was long)
Otago Peninsula, just outside Dunedin, is a pretty special place and we drove a loop around the bays then back up along the hills (there is some absolutely fantastic cycling in this area). The road around the bays was remarkably similar to that in Wellington; narrow, windy and no room for error with the sea right there. There were some groovy painted bus stops along the way
I love the oysters with their freaky eyes, skinny legs and big gumboots
We were heading the Taiaora Head to see if there were any Royal Albatross flying around. The only mainland Royal Albatross colony in the world is located there and we knew there were birds on nests but at times there are none to be seen in the sky. The colony is right at the entrance to the harbour
and we were lucky enough to have these amazing birds gliding overhead. We’d never seen them before and they really are huge. It was really difficult to get any decent photos though, let alone any that show the scale and size.
Their wingspan is about 3m and makes my arms look very short!
This is the Otago Harbour from the peninsula and Solis’ place in Port Chalmers is in the middle of the photo on the other side of the harbour
There are a couple of cool beaches around Dunedin and even though it was a pretty cold grey sort of day we went there to have a look. This is us at St Clair beach.
At a first glance there were a lot of people swimming but after a closer look we saw that they were just standing in the surf. I made some quip about probably being a hard core (and perhaps dozy) local rugby team
When they came out shivering and blue-lipped I asked if they were a rugby team. They were, but they weren’t a small local team. It was the Otago Highlanders squad (a Super 14 Team) doing post-training recovery.
Of course I’ve no idea who these guys are but a photo was a must after what I’d said! We were sorry to leave Dunedin (even if it was cold!) but we had a long way to go around the coast and the bottom of the South Island before meeting my Mother and step-father in a place called Te Anau.
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